Shell says fossil fuel reserves won’t be ‘stranded’ by climate regulationRoyal Dutch Shell has dismissed the possibility that its proven oil or gas reserves will become unusable as a result of climate change regulation, saying fossil fuels will play a key role in global energy to 2050 and beyond. Environmental campaigners, activist investor groups and some lawmakers have warned that financial markets could be overvaluing companies with large fossil fuel assets, such as Shell, thereby creating a ‘carbon bubble’ and putting at risk trillions of dollars in pension funds. Shell, however, played down such claims last week in a letter it said was in response to shareholder inquiries on the issue of ‘stranded’ assets, referring to large investments in fossil fuel reserves that could become unprofitable if governments pass laws to curb runaway growth in greenhouse gas emissions in an attempt to reduce the impact of climate change. ‘While the ‘stranded asset’ notion may appear to be a strong and thought-through case, it does have some fundamental flaws,’ JJ Traynor, Shell’s executive vice president of investor relations, said in the letter posted on the company’s website, dated May 16. Traynor maintained that the world will need oil and gas for many decades to come, supporting both demand and prices. ‘As such, we do not believe that any of our proven reserves will become ‘stranded’,’ he wrote. ‘There is a risk that focusing on ‘stranded assets’ or the concept of the ‘carbon bubble’ distracts attention away from the reality of a growing population, increasing prosperity and growing energy demand.’

Doing science by consensus is not science at all, says the climatologist all the alarmists love to hate. Not that the enmity bothers Judith Curry too much — and certainly not as much as the debasement of impartial inquiry by which the warmist establishment keeps all those lovely grants coming.

When climatologist Judith Curry visited Melbourne last week she took the time to chat with Quadrant Online contributor Tony Thomas. The professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology is something of a stormy petrel in the climate-change community, as she has broken ranks with alarmist colleagues to question the articles and ethics of the warmist faith. This has made her less than popular in certain circles, even inspiring Scientific American, house journal of the catastropharians, to brand her “a heretic” who has “turned on her colleagues.”

Such criticism leaves Curry unmoved. If anyone needs counselling, she says, then it is those academics who continue to preach the planet’s sweaty doom despite the fact that no warming has been observed for almost two decades.

The edited transcript of Curry’s conversation with Thomas is below:

TONY THOMAS: If the skeptic/orthodox spectrum is a range from 1 (intense skeptic) to 10 (intensely IPCC orthodox), where on the scale would you put yourself

(a) as at 2009

(b) as at 2014,

and why has there been a shift (if any)?
JUDITH CURRY: In early 2009, I would have rated myself as 7; at this point I would rate myself as a 3. Climategate and the weak response of the IPCC and other scientists triggered a massive re-examination of my support of the IPCC, and made me look at the science much more sceptically.

[...]

THOMAS: Re the halt to warming in the past 15-17 years, has this been adequately explained to the public? If it continues a few more years, is that the end of the orthodox case?CURRY: Regarding the hiatus in warming, I would say that this has not been adequately explained to the public, the IPCC certainly gave the issue short shrift.

The hiatus is serving to highlight the importance of natural climate variability. If the hiatus continues a few more years, climate model results will seriously be called into question. When trying to understand and model a complex system, there is, unfortunately, no simple test for rejecting a hypothesis or a model.

THOMAS: What empirical evidence is there, as distinct from modelling, that ‘missing heat’ has gone into the deep oceans?
CURRY: Basically, none. Observations below 2 km in the ocean are exceedingly rare, and it is only since 2005 that we have substantial coverage below 700 metres.